Assassin Hints Guard Part Of Plot

Rabin's Killer Says He Could `Turn Country Upside Down'

December 04, 1995|By New York Times News Service.

JERUSALEM — The confessed assassin of Yitzhak Rabin suggested Sunday that one of the slain prime minister's bodyguards was an accomplice in the shooting, asserting that if he told everything he knew it "would turn the country upside down."

The killer, Yigal Amir, spoke to reporters before the start of a hearing at the Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, where he was ordered held in custody for an additional four days.

His remarks before a battery of television cameras have become a ritual before court hearings, opportunities that Amir has seized to expound his views.

Police officers and the presiding judge, Dan Arbel, cut Amir off, as they have several times in the past, to prevent him from using the courtroom as a platform for his opinions. "

Amir, a 25-year-old Orthodox Jewish student, smiled and waved to his parents as he walked into the courtroom.

"Why don't you publish that they finished off one of Rabin's bodyguards?" he asked reporters, implying that one guard was killed by the other security men. "The one who shouted, `blanks, blanks!' "

Rabin's driver, Menachem Damti, reported after the assassination that Amir shouted "blanks" as he fired at the prime minister, apparently to confuse the bodyguards and squeeze off more shots. By saying a bodyguard shouted the words, Amir seemed to suggest that a guard was part of the plot.

A police representative in the courtroom waved off Amir's remarks as "nonsense." He submitted a secret document to the judge that he said included "new and important information" that justified keeping Amir in jail several more days before he is indicted.

In exchanges with Arbel, Amir said: "I can say something that will destroy everything. Everything until now was a mask. If I tell the truth, it would turn the country upside down."

Later, at a hearing of a state commission investigating the assassination, a police officer testified that he saw Amir's brother Hagai Amir at the shooting before Rabin was killed. The officer, 1st Sgt. Ronen Sahar, said he saw a man in a plaid shirt leaning on a van in the parking lot where Rabin was shot on Nov. 4, and later identified him from TV pictures as the assassin's brother.

Hagai Amir has been held on suspicion of plotting with his brother. In a separate hearing Sunday, he was ordered held for four more days.